Additional Info

Nearby Theaters

The Dover Drive-In opened as the Plant City Drive-In in the early-1950’s. It was located on the north side of Highway 574, or what was then Buffalo Avenue, between Plant City and the rural community of Dover.

The theater closed sometime in the 1970’s. Buffalo Avenue has since been renamed MLK Boulevard.

@Andy: Sorry about the messed up post above, I must be getting fatigued.

The aerial images are downloaded through <Earth Explorer, a USGS website. It is not as “user friendly” as Google Earth or HistoricAerials.com, but the site offers the capability to download aerial maps for the entire country from the 1940s and up, for virtually any sized community.

The selection of aerials available on Google Earth and HistoricAerials.com is extreamly limiting. If you have the location of the drive-in and know approximate what years it was open (or visible) you should be able to obtain the image you want.

The site is free, there is no cost to download. You will need to become a registered user, again no cost is involved. Just make sure to set the search parameters so that you request “aerial photo single frames” and set the number of searches to at least 100, the default setting is only 10.

The trick to Earth Explorer is to use images with the best resolution, a scale of 15000-30000 will produce acceptable results. The lower the scale, the higher the resolution. Even at a scale of 60000, a drive-in can be spotted fairly easily with a shape eye that knows where and what to look for.

Another issue is that when you download the photos, they are not “north” corrected automatically. You will need to rotate them with your imaging software so it is oriented north up.

Once the north is corrected, I zoom in to enlarge the drive-in, but not too much that I remove distinguishing features from the surroundings, which are necessary to match up the photo with more modern aerials, so I can obtain an exact current location.